Tag: 1999.

Matko Vekić, A Bridge, 1999

Matko Vekić
A Bridge, 1999
oil on canvas
195×200 cm
MG-6782

Matko Vekić (1970) is one of the most well-established and engaged Croatian painters of his generation. His painting mixes modernist stylisation and critique of society with a postmodernist reductionist narrative whose signs always point to something other than the visible. Vekić’s motifs resist superficial emblems and ornaments which, paraphrasing Adolf Loos, he considers a ‘crime’. He graduated in painting in the class of Đuro Seder in 1995 from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, where he has been teaching since 2011. With the help of the concrete-abstract, figurative-nonfigurative, organic-inorganic polarities, each of Vekić’s painting series is a well-thought-out painterly manifesto, artistic worldview and visual programme of signs pointing to a contemporary focus (Animal Circle – Zodiac, 2005; Symbol, Ornament, Sign and Crime, 2009; The Cruelty of the Circle, 2010; Orienta(lisa)tion, 2016). Comprising concrete and metal junctions, bridges and overpasses, Vekić’s early urban iconography renders the contemporary urban fabric of the city as a place of blocking dystopia.
Vekić’s painting A Bridge (1999) expresses his cold, analytical and distant gaze. With the help of a polarity – an intense view of the sky and a smallish organic arabesque of tree rings – Vekić draws a contrast between faceless figuration and an indirect “trace of nature”.
In his 20+ years of career as an artist, he has had over 40 solo exhibitions. He represented Croatia in 2006 and 2010 at the Cairo International Biennale, and in 2009 at the 53rd Venice Biennale.

Text: Željko Marciuš, museum consultant of the National Museum of Modern Art © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb
Translated by: Ana Janković
Photo: Goran Vranić © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb

Duje Jurić, Untitled, 1999

Duje Jurić
(1956)
Untitled, 1999
oil on canvas
150×150 cm
MG-6732

Duje Jurić (1956) is recognised as an innovator of Geometric Abstraction who appeared on Croatia’s New Geometric Art scene of the 1980s. He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb in 1981 under Prof. Vasilije Josip Jordan, and worked as an associate at painters Ljubo Ivančić and Nikola Reiser’s master workshop between 1982 and 1985. In the late 1980s he also collaborated with painter Julije Knifer on some of his murals. Initially he focused on transforming the avant-garde legacy of the Russian Avant-Garde, Constructivism, the Bauhaus Movement, De Stijl’s Neoplasticism, the New Tendencies Movement and the Fluxus Movement into his very own neoplastic style, claiming that: “Continuation of something onto something else always has a reason.” At the beginning he used neutral achromatic colours (black, white, grey), after which he expanded his palette (e.g., Untitled, 1995). The basic structure of Jurić’s painting is always a pattern that extends from vertical axes to more passive horizontals. He then created matrixes of meanders and rhombuses (in honour of painters Julije Knifer and Kazimir Malevich), with his other geometric variations generating even more densely networked geometric webs. Duje Jurić’s Untitled painting from 1999 represents one such achromatic labyrinth composed of metal tube-like vertical forms and rectangular geometric interweaving. Ultimately, he ended up elaborating the concept of painting with conceptual verbal-visual variations executed on appropriated objects (Paintings – Books, 2000), and painting-ambiance and light installations (Memo Chip, 2010; A Spatialised Paintings’ Network, 2020-2021), with which he has expanded his concept of painting striving after total geometry that would correspond to the universal digital-information age. He has exhibited in many solo exhibitions in both Croatia and abroad, and has received numerous awards for his work.

Text: Željko Marciuš, museum consultant of the National Museum of Modern Art © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb
Translated by: Ana Janković
Photo: Goran Vranić © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb

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